The Organization Man

CHAPTER 12 The Executive Ego

150 THE ORGANIZATION MAN tween rounds. To this end some executives go through an almost compulsive ritual-like watering the flowers at a regular week-end time whether or not it has just rained. To borrow an old phrase, they are never less at leisure than when they are at leisure. We have, in sum, a man who is so completely involved in his work that he cannot distinguish between work and the rest of his lifeand is happy that he cannot. Surrounded as he is by a society ever more preoccupied with leisure, he remains an anomaly. Not only does he work harder, his life is in a few respects more ascetic than the businessman of half a century ago. His existence is hardly uncomfortable , yet, save for the Cadillac, the better address, the quarter acre more of lawn, his style of living is not signally different from that of the men in middle management. And the fact doesn't concern him overmuch; the aspects of luxury that he talks about most frequently concern things that are organic to his work-good steak dinners, comfortable hotels, good planes, and the like. No dreams of Gothic castles or liveried footmen seize his imagination. His house will never be a monument, an end in itself. It is purely functional, a place to salve the wounds and store up energy for what's ahead. And that, he knows full well, is battle. cHAPTER 12 The Executive Ego IN THIS ABSORPTION IN WORK, MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE, LIES THE SEAT of the executive neurosis. From Dodsworth on, the figure of the businessman self-alienated from the wider life has been held up to Americans as a somewhat tragic figure. Why, when the purpose of our vast productive apparatus is the release of man from toil, do the people in charge of it so willfully deny themselves the fruits of it? Even the executive, as he ·Curses the demon within him, tends to feel a little guilty about it. But this is not the nub of his problem. His long absorption in work to the exclusion of everything else may hit him very hard when he retires and finds himself illiterate in the other kinds of life. The Executive Ego 151 But if work is a tyranny, it is a self-imposed tyranny. He sees the disparity between work and leisure only as a minor conflict. It is something he feels he should worry about. And he hasn't the time. The real conflict, I am going to argue in these chapters, is the conflict within· work. Of all the organization men the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that ·characterizes him, it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip. He does not want to be done right by; he wants to dominate, not be dominated. But he can't act that way. He must not only accept control, he must accept it as if he liked it. He must smile when he is transferred to a place or a job that isn't the job or place he happens to want. He must appear to enjoy listening sympathetically to points of view not his own. He must be less "goal-centered," more "employee-centered ." It is not enough now that he work hard; he must be a damn good fellow to boot. And that is the rub. Executives have always had to play a role, but the difference between role and reality is becoming increasingly difficult to resolve. Even executives who would hate to be accused of philosophical thought sense that they are poised midway in a rather perplexing shift of values. They applaud better human relations , permissive management, and the like, yet for them personally these same advances ask them to act out something of a denial of the kind of people they really are. The organization ideology can help people endure the pressures, and the mere playing of the role of the well-adjusted team player can help quiet the inner worries. As Pascal pointed out, if one acts long enough as if one believes, the grace of faith will eventually be given. But not to the executive. Many people from the great reaches of middle management can become true believers in The Organization -and, in this sense, I think laments over...